


at the wrong end of a very long tunnel

by wastrelwoods



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Character Study, Child Abuse, Emotional Manipulation, Gen, Non-Chronological, hindsight is 20/20 unless a high-level modify memory is involved, i mean i CANT NOT its ALL THERE to UNPACK, sixteen year olds Doin Murders! this isn't fun!, trans caleb, which is actually not one of the traumatizing things here its one of the good ones
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-17
Updated: 2018-05-17
Packaged: 2019-05-08 08:00:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14689848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wastrelwoods/pseuds/wastrelwoods
Summary: Caleb is trapped in a moment, burning.





	at the wrong end of a very long tunnel

**Author's Note:**

> there's a lot to unpack in caleb's narration of his very very heartbreaking backstory, huh? so i, uh, tried it. heavy inspiration from 'straw house, straw dog' by richard siken, whence came the title 
> 
> also, i'm aware nobody has used the title 'magister' for trent in canon i just thought his students would probably not address him by his first name, he doesn't seem like that kind of teacher. pardon my worldbuilding flavor there
> 
> also. there will probably be a future day where i go back and fix the spelling of aedwulf's name because i just GUESSED, OKAY, ITS ONLY BEEN A WEEK,

_You were burned, you were about to burn, you’re still on fire._  
Straw House, Straw Dog - Richard Siken 

 

*

“You read the story,” Magister Ikathon says, his face turned away so that Caleb can make out the hollow of a cheek, the sharp line of his nose, white hair curling at his shoulders. There are times he puts Caleb in mind of a vulture, the way his shoulders stoop and his eyes follow movement. It was a joke of theirs, Caleb and Astrid and Aedwulf, but Magister Ikathon is not fond of jokes. They interfere with the learning environment. 

This is not a schoolhouse, he says. This is training. Vital training. If they want to be of service, of use, worth all the trouble he has gone to to polish their rough edges, there will be no foolish joking. 

“You read the story,” he repeats, and taps his staff against the ornamental carpet, once, twice. “Tell me what you learned.” 

*

Very rarely has Caleb felt prepared to face a task before it begins. But this…this is a daunting task. He thinks that he has never been less sure of anything in his life. 

There was a time Caleb was very sure about things. But that was a long time ago.

Now the choice has been made for him. He--Ikathon--he has one of their own, and if Caleb does not at least try to stop him, what is he worth? Of what use is his second start, if he will make nothing better of it than the first? 

But Beauregard has other plans. “Tell them,” she says, suddenly, stopping him in mid-stride with her staff raised to his throat. Almost instinctively, Caleb feels his fingers blacken, and heat pools at the center of his palm. Ready. Burning. 

Caleb freezes, and looks back at her. At his party, just beyond. At the place where Yasha is not. His blood is liquid ice, his ears are ringing, he cannot breathe. “I am sure I don’t know what you mean,” he mumbles.

“Tell them,” Beau repeats, with her jaw set. “Or I will.” 

“I do not--what does it matter?” he says, stops, looks over all of them and does not meet any of their eyes. Beau keeps her staff raised, and he douses the flames with a groan. “You will not let this go.”

“I’ve got your back, Cay, alright? But you and me and Nott, we can’t handle this guy on our own,” she says. “We need them with us, and they can’t go in blind, either, or we’re just gonna fucking lose.” 

She has a keen mind for strategy, does Beauregard. And she can get people where she wants, not by being clever or subtle but by simply forcing their hands. Not cruel. Caleb knows cruelty. But practical. “It is too long a story to tell here,” he rasps, meets Beau’s stony face with a grimace, “You know that,” he says, firmly, and she sighs, lowering her staff. “I cannot tell them everything.” There is a moment before the leap, the last moment he can have this, the safety of not being known, and he hesitates there for as long as he can. “The mage. Ikathon. Trent. I know him.” 

The faces of the party range from impassive to concerned to curious, eyes on him from every direction so that Caleb feels dizzy and nauseous and raw as an open wound. He clears his throat. “Nearly every unforgivable thing I have done in my life, I did hoping to make that man proud,” he says, all in one breath, wavers, “And for the great glory of the Empire.” Caleb knows the way those words sound in his mouth. They are an old, familiar poison, dry as ash on his tongue. 

He does not look to their faces, hears Fjord’s low whistle and a mumbled oath from Mollymauk. “How unforgivable, exactly?” the tiefling says, lightly, and Caleb supposes he has a right to ask. 

He remembers how automatically the fire rose to his fingertips a moment ago and feels his gorge rise. “Caleb--” Beau says, and he cannot tell whether she wants him to say more or less. It is a fine line he must walk. To tell them what they are up against runs the risk of making them realize just what a liability Caleb himself is. But there is nothing for it. 

“I killed for him,” he confesses, “many times. Without question.” The words come out thick and slow and jagged. “But in the end I was not strong enough to--to do what he said must be done, without breaking after. Otherwise I suppose I would still be following him now.” It is half the truth, less the echoes of his family’s screams, the half-blurred memory of doubling over, choking on soot and shaking, too weak to turn his back to the fire. Too weak to run headlong into the flames, to get them out or die trying. A traitor to two identities--a son, a soldier--both blistering and cracking under the heat and the pressure and the _heat_ , and then he was neither. He was nothing at all. 

“Caleb,” someone says again, and which voice it is does not matter. He stares down at his boots, and shakes away the fog. Caleb’s sins are his own. They have little bearing on the trouble Yasha is in now. 

“Be careful,” he chokes out. “That is all I mean to say. He is...very persuasive. Powerful.” 

*

Caleb is distant, and closed-off, and strange, and he stares fixedly at things that are not there. All his jagged, splintered edges stand out in sharp relief, visible at half a glance. He feels no more than half sane on the best of days, carrying too much horror and pain to hold himself in the shape of a person. 

But it is deserved. 

Caleb was a precocious child, once, full of vigor and excitement and big, shiny dreams. People looked at him with pride, with love, with wonder. All of Blumenthal watched him grow and learn and learn and go on learning still, and Mother and Father watched too. It was seldom the pair of them had two copper to scrape together, but they had each other, and they had their pride, and they had hope. Always hope. 

They had faith in Caleb, too. “My darling,” Mother would say, cradling him on her lap while he copied the worn pages of a great-aunt’s old spellbook in ink mixed from charcoal and old beer. A conjuration to make lights to dance in their home in the dark of winter, when candle money had to be spend on bread instead. “My brightest star, look at you. You make me so proud.” 

“Oh, look at this,” Father would say, kneeling beside him as they filled the fireplace with dry wood, side by side, Father’s warm brown hands over Caleb’s small, freckled pair. As their hands danced together, weaving the spell between their fingers and sending a shower of sparks over the wood, igniting it. “You are surpassing your Papa, _Spatz_. Soon you will be teaching me!” 

Caleb is trapped in a moment, burning. For ten years he does nothing else. He cannot find it within him to do anything but remain there, lost in that moment in perpetuity, eyes searching the crumbling stone walls around him without seeing anything outside his own head. 

He dreams, or something close to it, wide awake and in his body and outside it all at once. Mother sits beside him, winding her long red curls into a plait the way she does every morning, pinning it into a bun, her eyes flickering over in Caleb’s direction every few moments, a frown playing over her mouth. Father paces by the bars of the door, flicking his penknife over a small block of wood, carving away at it in gentle slices. “You’ve been very quiet, my star,” he says. “Something wrong?” 

Caleb watches the fire crawl up his body, hears his mother begin to scream, and he does not speak. 

* 

The story. The lesson. Magister Ikathon is waiting for his answer. 

It was a book of history, tales of the foundation of the Empire, the heroic men and women who brought glory to the flourishing young kingdom. Caleb’s flawless memory provides him a picture-perfect snapshot of every embossed page. 

An unconventional assignment for a student of the arcane, Aedwulf had said. Ikathon had only smiled his thin-lipped smile. “We may all learn from our past how to better mold the future,” he had replied, before striking Aedwulf to the ground with the back of his hand for the impertinence of the question. “You are not students of the arcane. You are servants of the Empire. Know her history.” 

But it cannot be only his memory that Ikathon wants. A proof of understanding, perhaps. Of a lesson learned. 

Astrid relates again the events recorded in the passage--three brothers sent to vanquish a rebellion in the Marrow Valley, the discovery and execution of the rebellion’s leader. Two of the brothers cut down in the battle. When the last surviving brother returned to his home, he found his young sister weeping over the loss of the traitor--who had been her betrothed--and so he struck her down where she stood. “The judgement of the law should be swift,” Astrid says, “And decisive. The soldier takes action immediately, and does not doubt himself.” 

Ikathon remains turned away, staring out the bay window over the mountainscape, like his eyes are seeking out the high towers of Rexxentrum far beyond his sight. “Very perceptive,” he says, quietly, then, “Widogast. Tell me what you learned.” 

*

When Caleb is eleven, amidst the swirling color of the Harvest Close festival and before the biting chill of winter sets in, he abandons a name that does not feel like his own. Mother and Father’s pride does not waver for even an instant--if anything, it grows. “A son,” Mother says to Father, stringing a wreath of autumn leaves over the threshold of the door, fiery reds and golds. Her smile is wide and warm. “Leofric, we have a son.”

Father kisses the crown of her head, musses Caleb’s hair with a hand. “I think this calls for a treat, don’t you, _Schatz_? I heard a man selling candied apples at the market this morning.” 

The three of them spend a hard-earned silver on those candied apples, sit and laugh and offer up suggestions of new names to Caleb while the toffee melts sweet and sticky over his fingers and his face. “It’s your choice, my star,” Mother tells him. “Nobody but you decides who you’re going to be, alright? Your Papa and I, we’ll help where we can, but it’s your choice. We trust you’re going to be somebody very special.”

*

They have only been with Magister Ikathon two months the first time he makes them executioners. Two months of endless studying, hours of lessons, difficult lessons, and harsh punishments for failing to meet Ikathon’s high expectations. “You are here because I could clearly see the potential in all of you for _greatness_ ,” he tells them. “I would hope that none of you intend to prove me wrong.” 

Harsh punishments, but great rewards. High praise. Caleb and Astrid and Aedwulf wear their white robes with pride, bend magics to their will that they could scarcely have dreamed of, even back at the Academy. And they have always been big dreamers, the three of them. The Empire is hard at work, shaping them into instruments of greatness. Without the Empire none of this would be achievable. 

Crowns’ Guard with gold gilding on their armor bring the elf in, in chains enchanted to suppress the use of magic. He looks small, even in their young eyes. Pale skin, strange silver glint to his eyes, arcane markings winding up his arms. “Some of us seek knowledge of the arcane to further the great glory of the Empire,” Ikathon explains. “An some seek it for their own gain. This one--” he gestures with his staff, “Brokered a deal with a strange god, a betrayer from the Abyssal Plane. Offered his very _soul_ to it. See the stains of his pact.” 

Caleb feels a shiver run up his spine. The elf’s face is thin and sallow, cast in the flickering white torchlight. He looks sinister. Dangerous. 

Aedwulf’s eyes are wide. Astrid stands ramrod-straight, barely breathing. The train of Ikathon’s robe sweeps the floor as he walks. “For this atrocity, he has been offered the choice of exile or death. He chose the latter.” His gaze, which had been wandering aimlessly through the shadowed corners of the chamber, snaps suddenly to the three of them. “Who will carry out the sentence?”

The order takes Caleb aback, and for a moment he stands completely frozen. What is he meant to be? An instrument of greatness. Servant of the Empire. _Be of use_ , he thinks, and feels his fingertips beginning to blacken, calling forth a spell, following his gut reaction to obey Magister Ikathon without question, mind and body spinning in wildly different directions. 

But it is Astrid who reaches him first. She steps up to the elf, her lovely face impassive and cold, and clasps a palm against his neck. Necrotic infection spreads from her fingertips in a wave of black light, and the elf shudders and cries out as his eyes go white and glassy. When she pulls away the elf slumps to the ground and lays there unmoving, a gray handprint still visible at the side of his throat. 

*

Killing is easy. Caleb learned his lesson well. Sanity does not suit him, the state he finds himself now. It sits strange and awkward and uncomfortable on his broad shoulders. Ten years. Ten _years_. 

The man in the white robes claws at Caleb’s arm in a panic, but he does not let go, pressing his flaming hands against the mage’s face, one red-hot palm clasped over his mouth to stop his screams. Caleb doesn’t remember his name. A face he saw around the manor some days, dragging in prisoners and dragging out bodies. Blindly loyal, a tool of greatness, just like him. 

The movements are practiced, easy, they come back at the drop of a hat, and why shouldn’t they? An entire decade passed him by while he sat in that room, stared at those walls, walked around in a trance murmuring to himself about the smell of smoke. All his hands could remember during that time were the gestures to summon up firebolts, they had to keep his arms bound so he wouldn’t burn the whole place down in the night. 

Killing is easy, and Caleb watches the life leave the mage’s eyes with horror. He backs away, dry heaves onto the ground, and pats out the flames frantically against the fabric of his thin cotton tunic. 

“ _Schiesse_ ,” he breathes. The dead mage does not move. Caleb drops to his knees, crawls close enough to reach out and pull the amulet from the corpse with shaking hands, tie it around his own neck, wipe tears and bile from his face. 

He wants to go back, because going forward from this point feels impossible. Pointless, even. There is nothing he wants there. Everything is behind him, everything he lost, everything he destroyed. He wants to go back so badly it aches.

For the moment, though, he cannot stay where he is. He picks a direction at random and begins to walk. 

*

Back to the history lesson. The book. The tale of the soldier. Caleb mulls it over, feet shuffling against the carpet. “It is a story about the Empire over all,” he offers. “The soldier’s duty to his family could not come before his duty to the Empire. Family is...family is important.” He misses them badly, has not seen them face to face in a year, yearns every day for his mother’s smiles and his father’s laughter. The letters they send are never long enough. Ink is expensive, and paper too. “But disloyalty must be punished regardless. No exceptions, or the law breaks down.” 

Ikathon turns away from the window and looks them over, one by one, a rare smile playing at the corners of his thin lips. “Exactly so. You’re a smart boy, Widogast.” 

His heart sings with the praise, and Caleb nods and murmurs a “ _Danke_ , Magister Ikathon.” From the other side of the chamber, Astrid offers Caleb a smile, and a thumbs up. He hides a blush in the hood of his cloak.

*

Evocation, say the instructors at the Soltryce Academy, is creating something from nothing. Reaching into the untapped potential of empty space and filling it with energy, life, color. Like taking a peasant boy who cannot afford a future and offering him the chance to make one. 

Caleb has a knack for it, spinning glyphs around his fingers like his Father taught him, but better, smoother and quicker and more precise. Crushing components in his palm and blowing the dust over his fingertips and calling forth lightning from the empty air. 

He likes the way he feels with flames flickering over his fingers, leaving a faint char to the surface of his skin that never fades, but never does him any harm, either. He likes the way it warms his hands from the inside out. He doesn’t like the way his spellcasting draws attention in his direction, from teachers and from fellow students, because for all that he grew up with Blumenthal’s eyes on him their praise doesn’t feel like pride. It feels like envy. 

He doesn’t make many friends, that first semester. Most of the students at the Academy are children of Rexxentrum’s upper crust, have all known each other for years and years. Rumor has it one of the students two years above Caleb is a distant Dwendal cousin herself. That sort don’t talk to peasant boys, no matter what they’re making of themselves. 

He spends a lot of nights in the library, poring over books, determined not to waste his chance. 

Aedwulf is there, sometimes, in the same boat as Caleb. He’s a few months Caleb’s junior, and two inches taller, with dark eyes that make Caleb’s heart race when he looks too long. They never spoke much back home, but here they find it easier to share a table in the corner of the library, under the same torchlight, pointing out interesting passages as they come across them. 

Transmutation, Aedwulf tells him, takes the given properties of something and reshapes them into whatever the caster wants. You need the physical, the existence of something, but once you have it you can reach out and touch the very fabric of reality, bend it to your whim. “It’s usually fire, ice, shrinking or growing, stuff like that,” he says, pointing out the glyphs and incantations with his chin near Caleb’s shoulder. “But people say you can use the same principles to alter time. Speed it up, slow it, stop it. Reverse it, maybe.” 

Caleb meets his eyes and sees them sparkling with delight, can’t help but grin in return. “Sounds like a lot of work for a maybe,” he teases. 

Aedwulf flips the page over. “Well, maybe it would be worth the effort.” 

*

He realizes the first night he’s back home that he expected something would feel different. It seems like the kind of thing that ought to make you feel different and strange and perhaps even ill at ease, returning home to see his parents having forgotten to wipe the last of a woman’s ashes off his boots. He worried it might make him falter, that his parents perhaps would not understand the pride he feels for the way his magic is keeping the Empire safe. 

They have always been the first to take pride in him, in the person he is making of himself. If he did not have their approval...but he does. Always and forever. And it’s easy to feel sure that he is doing the right thing, when it has brought him so much good fortune. When people he trusts implicitly, wise, experienced people like Magister Ikathon, tell him that he has done well. 

It isn’t always easy, following orders, even if he does it readily and willingly. He’s young, still, and inexperienced, and it catches him off guard from time to time to hear traitors and dissidents beg for their lives at his feet. 

But he follows through, all the same. For the great glory of the Empire. 

Mother and Father greet him with a warm embrace, fuss over the overgrown length of his hair and the expensive material of his cloak. It feels good to speak Zemnian again, the way the three of them always do at home. “Look how tall you’re growing, my star,” Father tells him, and “Are you eating enough? Does this Archmage feed you properly?” Caleb hugs them close, and does not mention that such things are usually conditional on sufficient progress made in their studies. It is a good night. 

The next night is divided neatly into two sets of overlapping memories, both blurry and artificial and strange. In one version, it is the murmur of hushed voices that pulls him away from his studies long after midnight, and in the other it is, perhaps, that feeling of strangeness finally catching up to him. In one version he sits beside his mother and drinks tea and thinks about the woman he killed a week ago who would not stop weeping, who looked at him with something dangerously close to pity as he burned her to ash. She runs her hands through his hair and does not ask why he is shaking. 

In the other version, the clearer of the two, he crouches at the top of the stair as a waking nightmare unfolds before his eyes. It is the greatest betrayal he has ever felt, it claws at his heart like nothing else, and by the time he finds the strength to stand and lock himself back in his room, he’s trembling from head to toe with terror. With...with anger. That sense of unrest he had expected to feel on his return home never came. The disgusted shame he feels at his parents’ treachery far surpasses it. 

His mother is pinning her braid into a bun when he comes down the next morning. “Caleb, _liebling_ , help me hang the garland for Harvest’s Close?” She smiles at him as though nothing--as though she had not--

Caleb’s stomach twists with nausea, and he pulls his spellbooks close to his chest, dizzy, shaken, scared. “I...have to go. Mother, Father, I have to go.” 

*

It does not take the fire long to catch. The thatching is new and dry--Father had only finished patching it a fortnight ago, had told Caleb as much on his fateful visit home. 

For a while, watching the fire spread over the timbers fills him with a sense of sick satisfaction. Astrid stands and watches with him. Her mother had coughed up blood over the front of her blouse when she died, the red stain is dark and ominous in the flickering firelight. Aedwulf’s eyes are duller than Caleb has ever seen them, but his jaw is set firm, and his hands don’t shake the way Caleb’s do. 

“It’s--it’s done,” he says, the moment before he hears the first scream. The last moment of feeling sure, feeling like a hero in a story, like an instrument of greatness, forged from nothing. 

It’s easy, in the end, to do his duty. It only costs everything he has. 

*

Caleb is trapped in a moment, burning. 

He does not know the patient who approaches him, the torchlight like a halo over her dark hair. He barely feels her hands on his face. But he feels the clarity trickle in slow and cold, dousing the flames and chilling him to his bones.

And there, buried in the ashes, is the truth. Clearer than he has been able to see it in many years. Caleb meets his savior’s eyes, and thanks her, and weeps like a lost child. 

Before, he had nothing. Now, the barest hint of something. Like evocation.

Ten years he has been in his little stone room, shut away from the world to burn on the altar of his own failures. But he cannot leave all of that behind. It’s there in his head. He can feel the weight of it on his shoulders. 

Not something from nothing, then, but a thing with a changed property, given a new purpose. 

Caleb looks to the future, in the hopes that one day he can look to the past.

**Author's Note:**

> also find me @wastrelwoods on tumblr and twitter! and give me feedback oh please do i love feedback 
> 
>  
> 
> the history book that's mentioned is a wildmount version of livy's 'from the founding of the city', which is full of mythologized accounts of roman kings and heroes. yeah, i'm that bitch! anyway i'm specifically referencing the tale of the horatii brothers here


End file.
